In 1616 the Roman Catholic Church's Congregation of the Index declared the Copernican doctrine, that the sun is at rest and the earth moves, to be false and contrary to Scripture. In 1633 the Roman Inquisition found Galileo Galilei 'vehemently suspect of heresy' for defending it, forced him to abjure, and placed him under house arrest for the rest of his life.

This card needs to avoid a popular but discredited framing. The nineteenth-century 'conflict thesis' of John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White presented the story as one episode in a perpetual war between science and religion. Historians of science such as Ronald Numbers, Maurice Finocchiaro, and John Heilbron have shown that this narrative is badly oversimplified. The Church was the largest patron of astronomy in early modern Europe, and the case does not show that Christianity opposes science as such.

The narrower claim is the one that survives scrutiny: a specific institution, at a specific time, treated a contested question in natural philosophy as settled by its reading of the Bible and used its authority to prohibit one side of the debate. That is the claim this card tests.

“Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and moon, in the Valley of Aijalon.” And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies.Joshua 10:12-13

“He set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be moved.”Psalm 104:5

Opponents of Copernicus also cited Psalm 93:1, 1 Chronicles 16:30, and Ecclesiastes 1:5, which describe the earth as fixed and the sun as moving. These verses are written in ordinary observational language, and the question was whether that language had to be read as a statement of cosmology.

“...foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical...”Qualifiers’ report to the Holy Office on the proposition that the sun is immobile at the center, 24 February 1616 (trans. Finocchiaro)

The consultants' report is not the same document as the public decree. On 5 March 1616 the Congregation of the Index declared that the doctrine of the earth's motion and the sun's immobility was false and altogether contrary to Holy Scripture. It suspended Copernicus's De revolutionibus until it was corrected, and it prohibited other works that defended the doctrine. The decree did not itself declare the doctrine a formal heresy, and the book was reissued in 1620 with a small number of passages changed to present the theory as a hypothesis.

The Church tolerated Copernicus for decades. De revolutionibus appeared in 1543, dedicated to Pope Paul III, and was used by astronomers, including Catholic ones, for calculation. The trouble began when Galileo's telescopic discoveries after 1609 made the question urgent, and when it became a matter of whether the theory was physically true and not just a calculating device.

Cardinal Robert Bellarmine was not a simple opponent. The Jesuit theologian told Paolo Foscarini in 1615 that treating heliocentrism as a mathematical hypothesis was fine. He added that if there were a real demonstration that the earth moves, the church would have to reconsider how it interpreted the relevant verses. As Bellarmine wrote in his 1615 letter to Foscarini, if a true demonstration were found, "then it would be necessary to be very careful in interpreting the Scripture and rather to say that we do not understand it than to declare false what is demonstrated." However, he did not believe such a demonstration existed. He also invoked the Council of Trent's rule against interpreting Scripture contrary to the unanimous consent of the Fathers, who had read these texts geocentrically.

The evidence was not as decisive in 1616 as it looks in hindsight. Galileo's observation of the phases of Venus refuted a simple Ptolemaic model, but it was equally compatible with Tycho Brahe's system, in which the planets orbit the sun and the sun orbits a fixed earth. No one observed stellar parallax until the 1830s. Galileo's own argument from the tides was wrong, and he ignored Kepler's elliptical orbits. Many serious astronomers, including Jesuits, held Tycho's view as a reasonable position.

Galileo made the situation worse. He was gifted and combative, and he mocked opponents in print. In his letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615) he argued about biblical interpretation, which many churchmen saw as outside his role. In 1632 he published the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems with a license that was obtained under disputed circumstances. It put the argument Pope Urban VIII had asked him to include into the mouth of a character named Simplicio, and it omitted Tycho's system entirely.

Urban VIII was a complex figure. As Cardinal Maffeo Barberini he had been a friend and admirer of Galileo. As pope, in the middle of the Thirty Years' War and facing accusations of being soft on heresy, he reacted badly to what he took as personal ridicule. Historians continue to debate how much of the 1633 outcome was politics, how much was theology, and how much was Galileo's alleged violation of a 1616 injunction (the surviving documents about it conflict with Bellarmine's own certificate).

The core issue remains. Even after granting all of this, the 1616 and 1633 decisions were made because the Copernican view was judged to be contrary to Scripture. A theory that, in its broad outline, turned out to be right was formally prohibited on that basis. The church did not act on a scientific refutation, because none existed. The Dialogue stayed on the Index until 1835, and Pope John Paul II acknowledged in 1992 that errors had been made.

Apologists and some historians offer several responses. They are not equally strong, and some correct real errors in the popular story.

It is virtually certain that the 1616 decree declared heliocentrism contrary to Scripture and that Galileo was condemned in 1633 for suspected heresy connected with defending it. It is very likely that biblical interpretation was a primary motivation for the prohibition, alongside defense of Aristotelian natural philosophy and the post-Tridentine concern to control scriptural exegesis.

It is highly probable that Galileo's personality, Urban VIII's political position, and the dispute over the 1616 injunction affected the timing and severity of the 1633 outcome. It is also probable that the evidence for heliocentrism in 1616 was not conclusive. This matters, because it means the Church's error was not that it rejected a proven theory. Its error was that it ruled on a question open to empirical investigation by appealing to its reading of Scripture, when other Catholics, including Bellarmine, left room for the possibility of revision.

It is very unlikely that this episode supports the broader claim that Christianity is inherently hostile to science. The historical evidence for that claim is poor, and this card does not make it.

The bottom line: The narrow claim is very likely accurate: an institution that claimed divine authority prohibited a view that was broadly correct, on the basis of its interpretation of the Bible, and it took until 1992 to say so publicly. The wider claim that science and religion are at war is most likely wrong. A good account of the Galileo affair has to hold both of these at once.